Chinese foundry gets makeover, new ID

XMC is a foundry with 300-mm wafers, saddled with no legacy of old 200-mm wafers.

XMC has two fab shells, each with a capacity of 30,000
wafers per month. While the company currently uses only one shell, it
has the capacity to handle 60,000 wafers per month in total when fully
equipped.

Today, XMC is churning out 12,000 wafers per month,
“90 percent of which are filled,” said Lange. “We don’t believe in
‘build it, they will come.’ We are ramping up our capacity based on
partner engagements,” explained Lange.

Lange claimed that the foundry has been doubling its revenue since 2006, and “we are already cash flow positive.”

So, who are XMC’s customers?

Spansion
has been working with XMC since 2008, with XMC doing both 60-nm and
45-nm productions for Spansion’s NOR Flash. XMC also recently announced a
long-term supply agreement with GigaDevice, a Beijing-based, red hot NOR
flash company, poised to grow its business worldwide.

XMC has
another partner, whose identity the foundry declined to disclose. This
unnamed partner alone, however, is using up to10,000 wafers per month,
according to Lange.

Due to its customization strategy, XMC won’t
be able to serve hundreds of customers, but the company appears to have
several more “partners.”

XMC’s current products include 60-45nm
MirrorBit NOR Flash and 90-65nm ETOX NOR Flash. The company claims to
have equipment capacity to support logic and memory down to 32nm. XMC
also has a new specialty technology line to support 3D IC (Wafer
backside processing and stacking).

"Megafoundries" are only needed to service a few, monster markets like smartphones and tablets. There you have to scale and bleeding edge technology to make the cheapest memories or processors to serve huge volume orders. It is a total commodity play. There's a lot more innovation in the semiconductor industry than just pushing Moore's Law and I think XMC and others realize this.

They know it. That's exactly why Lange, ex-IBMer and now at XMC, is saying that's not what the new foundry will do. Instead, XMC is focused on selected customers, forge "partnerships" (a la IBM Common Platform), customize process, and develop "technology with a twist" for that partner, as he put it.

If they are doing straight cmos from 0.35 to 65...i see this venture to be a gross failure...unless they invest R and D and look at doing non standard stuff line SiGe BiCMOS or GaN...this venture will get eaten by the likes of TSMC, GloFo....